The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

One question we see regularly come up is what to do if you're targeting particular locations/regions with your site content, and you want to rank for local searches, but you don't actually have a physical presence in those locations. The right track can depend on a few circumstances, and in today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand helps you figure out which one is best for your organization.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!

Video Transcription

Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about geo-targeted or geo-specific local landing pages for companies that are trying to reach many geographic regions and need to have that scale, but don't necessarily have a local physical location in every city they're trying to target.

So if you can imagine I'm going to use the fictitious Rand's Whisky Company, and Rand's Whisky Company is going to be called Specialty Whisky. We're going to be running events all over the country in all sorts of cities. We're going to be trying to reach people with a really local approach to whisky, because I'm very passionate about whisky, and I want everyone to be able to try scotches and bourbons and American whiskies as well.

Okay, this sounds great, but there's going to be a big challenge. Rand's Whisky Company has no physical location in any city other than our main Seattle headquarters. This is a big challenge, and I've talked to many startups and many companies who have this same problem. Essentially they need to rank for a core set of terms in many different geographies.

So they might say, "Hey, we want to be in Nashville, Tennessee, and in Atlanta, Georgia, and we've identified a lot of whisky consumers in, let's say, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. But we can't open physical, local office space in every one of those geographies. In fact, we could probably only start by having a Web presence in each of those. We haven't yet necessarily achieved sort of scale and service in every single one of those geos." It's not like I'm running events in every one of these the day I start. I might start with Seattle and Portland and maybe Boise, Idaho, or Spokane or something like that, and then eventually I'll grow out.

This presents a big challenge in search results, because the way Google's results work is that they bias to show kind of two things in a lot of categories. They'll try and show you the local purveyors of whatever it is that the person is searching for in the local or maps results. Obviously, Pigeon had a big change and update to these, changing the geographic areas and changing the ordering of those results and now many map results show up, and those sorts of things. But obviously they're still very present.

We see them a lot. MozCast sees a very high percent of local intent queries even sometimes without the city modifier. If you're in a geography, you search for a whisky store, and you know what? Liquor stores and specialty liquor companies and that kind of stuff, they're going to show up in your search results here in Seattle in those Maps local boxes. So that makes it tough.

Then the other category is, of course, the organic web results. That's where folks like this, Rand's Whisky Company and other folks who are trying to scale their local presence, need to show up because you really won't have an opportunity in those local results unless and until you have true local physical space. So you're aiming for those Web results.

You're oftentimes competing with people like Yelp and Angie's List. A lot of the old Yellow Pages folks are in their directories and guides. Then sometimes, occasionally there will be a company that does a great job with this.

So there two companies that I want to call out. One is Uber, which everyone is pretty much familiar with, and Uber has done a great job of having their website contained in unique portals for each city in which they operate, unique social accounts, unique blogs. They really have put together a segmented operation that targets each city that they're in. They do have physical space, so they're cheating a little bit on this front.

Then another one is a company called Ride the Ducks, and Ride the Ducks has different websites for every city that they operate in. So there's a duck tour in Boston, a duck tour in Seattle, a duck tour in Los Angeles, all this kind of stuff. You can ride the ducks in any of these cities.

Now let's say that you're a startup or a company starting out, and you're thinking, "Okay, fine. I'm going to have my Specialty Whisky page for Seattle, and I'll just put some generic information in there, and then I'll replace Seattle with Portland, with Los Angeles, with Baton Rouge." That's my Baton Rouge page. That's my Los Angeles page. This is called the find and replace.

Even if you push this out, even if you customize some of the content on this page, try and make it a little more specific, have a few addresses or locations, you will fail. Unfortunately, Angie's List, who I mentioned, they do a really terrible job of this. They have a lot of pages that are what I call find and replace pages. You could just plug in nearly any city, and that's what the results would look like. They do rank. They are ranking because they were early and because they've got a lot of domain authority. Do not think that you can copy their content strategy and succeed.

The next one is a little bit more scaled out. This is a little bit more like what someone such as a Yelp or TripAdvisor might do for some of their landing pages. They've got some unique info in each city. It's the same for each city, but it's scaled out and it's relatively comprehensive. So, my Specialty Whisky Seattle page might show our favorite bars in Seattle. It might show some recommended stores where you can buy whisky. It might show some purveyors, some vendors, that we like. It could have some local events listed on the page. Fine, great. That could be good enough if the intent is always the same.

So if every city's intent, the people who are searching for restaurants in Portland versus restaurants in Seattle, you're basically looking for the same thing. It's the same kind of people looking for the same kind of thing, and that's how Yelp and TripAdvisor and folks like that have scaled this model out to success.

If you want to take it even one step further, my final recommendation is to go in that direction of what Uber and Ride the Ducks and those types do, which is they essentially have a customized experience created by a local team in that city, even if they don't necessarily have a physical office. Uber, before they open the physical office, will send people out. They'll go team gathering. Yelp did this, too, in their history as they were scaling out.

That kind of thing is like, "Hey, we've got some photos from some of our events. We've got a representative in the city." This is Seattle Whiskey Pete, and Whiskey Pete says, "Yar, you should buy some whiskey." It's got a list of events. So Knee High is stocking up for the holiday (presumably at the Knee High Stocking Company, which is a great little speakeasy here in Seattle), and whisky at Bumbershoot. You can follow our @WhiskySeattle account on Twitter, and that's different from our @WhiskyPortland, our @WhiskyLosAngeles or our @WhiskyNewYork accounts. Great.

There's a bunch of top Seattle picks. So this is a very customized page. This experience is completely owned and controlled by a team that's focused purely on Seattle. This is sort of the Holy Grail. It's hard to scale to this, which is why this other approach can really be okay for a lot of folks trying to scale up and rank for all of those geo terms plus their keywords.

What's the process by which you go about this? I'm glad you asked because I wrote it down. Number one, we want to try and determine the searcher's intent and how we can satisfy the query and at the same time delight visitors. We've got to create a unique, special experience for them and delight visitors in addition to satisfying their query.

So for Seattle whisky, I can show them where they can buy whisky in the city. I can recommend some bars that have a great whisky selection, and then I can delight them by showing some tips and tricks from our community. I can delight them by giving them special priority access to events. I can delight them by giving them a particular guide that they could print out and take with them or the ability to register for special things that they couldn't get elsewhere, buy whiskies that they'd never be able to get, whatever it is, something special to delight them.

Number two, I want to select the group of keywords, and I say group because usually there are a few keywords in every one of the verticals that I've talked to people about. There are usually between 3 and about 20 sets of keywords that they really, deeply care about per each geography. Do be careful. You've got to be wary of local colloquialisms. For example, if you're in the United States, whiskey is often spelled with an "e", W-H-I-S-K-E-Y, whereas in the U.K. and most of Europe, most of the rest of the English language speaking world, it's spelled W-H-I-S-K-Y with no "e".

Also you want to take those groups, and you want to actually combine them. So say I've got a bunch of keywords over here. I might want to say, "Hey, you know what? These three keywords, whisky tastings and whisky events, that's the same intent." I don't need to create two different landing pages for those. Let's take those and bunch them up and group them and make that one page. That'll be our Seattle Whisky Events page, and we'll target tastings and events and festivals and whatever other synonyms might go in there.

Third, I want to create a few of these, one of these two models of really amazing pages as a sample, as an instruction for all future ones. This is what we want to get to. Let's make the best, most perfect page for Seattle, and then we'll go make one for Portland and we'll go make one for Los Angeles. Then we'll see how do we get that into a process that will scale for us. You want that process to be repeatable. You want it to be well-defined. You want it to be so that a content team, who comes in, or contractor, an agency can take that document, can look at the examples, and replicate that on a city by city basis. That's going to require a lot of uniqueness. You need to have those high bars set up so that they can achieve them.

The fourth and last thing for these pages you're creating is you've got to be able to answer this question: Who will amplify this page and why? By amplify, I mean share socially, share via word of mouth, share via email, link to it. Who will amplify it and why? How are we going to reach them?

Then go get them. Go prove to yourself that with those two or three amazing example pages that you made that you can actually do it, and then make that part of your scaling process.

Now you've got something where you can truly say, "Yes, we can go geo by geo and have the potential to rank in market after market for the terms and phrases that we care about in the organic results."

Long term, if you have a lot of success in a city, my next suggestion would be that you move from this model to this model where you actually have a local team, just one person, even a contractor, someone who visits. It doesn't have to be a permanent resident of that city. It can be someone who goes there a month out of the year, whatever it is, every few weekends and owns that page and that experience and that section of your site for that specific geo that produces remarkable results.

They build relationships. That furthers your press, and that furthers your brand in that town. There's a lot of opportunity there. So that's eventually where you want to move to.

All right, everyone. I hope all of you out there who are building local, geo-targeted landing pages at scale have found this valuable, and I hope you're going to go build some phenomenal pages. Maybe someone will even start a whisky company for me.

All right, everyone. Take care. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Great example you used today using the term 'Seattle Whisky'. I'm sitting here in Scotland thinking "Hey! that's not how the American's spell Whisky!".

For my company we had to make a decision many years ago to adopt either American English or Queen's English for the positioning of our online properties. So we work in the data visualization world and compete with the like's of Tableau Software (in your neck of the woods I believe). And we decided we had to drop the 's' for the 'z' and say bye to the 'u' in colour and so on.

The decision is a question of scale, the US is the bigger market yes but we don't have a physical presence in the US. So over many many years of 'geographical focused' (language etc.) marketing efforts, we have built up our customer base in the US to the point that it matches or exceeds our UK base. We are now this year at a point where we rank higher in the US compared to the UK for the exact same search terms and higher for terms such as 'data visualization', compared to 'data visualisation'. I am happy but intrigued about this at the same time as our physical IP address is in the UK, so obviously other factors are at play here.

We also try to adopt Reithian principles to our online content (something I see in Moz in abundance). It's not enough to just make your content relevant to the searcher, it is also paramount that as well as being relevant you need to educate the user, inform them and (like WBF) entertain them.

I love the idea of having individual 'city-reps' who take ownership of each location page - I really think it's the only way to do it well!

I worked on a major wedding directory site for several years where our top goal was to rank for every type of wedding vendor in every possible location. We took the option 2 approach since the intent was the same for every location (creating unique content at least somewhat relevant to each major city) & saw incredible results. I do wish we could have gone with option 3 & provided an experience that really "delights" the visitor, but we didn't have the resources at the time. This could be a good time to build on that early success. Thanks for all the ideas!

The Companies which have not the physical presence but needs to target the local keywords, local landing page, really got the important helps from your Article Rand. They spent too much money on the virtual address providers agencies.

Good stuff, Rand. I've even had clients try to set up PO Box's in cities and have them verified in an effort to show up in the Google Local results. That was a fun conversation.

Question: In building out local targeted pages, do you think it best to utilize folders or sub domains. For example, if I own whiskey.com and wanted to start targeting cities, would it be best to use whiskey.com/seattle or seattle.whickey.com?

I know this might sound old school but I guess it might help if you put up as well some pictures of that city and name the files after the location in that city (plus alt text). When people search in the Google picture search for that location in that specific city and are happy with the result this might give Google an indicator too that you deal with that city.

Yes! Great advice - visuals are key for engagement and they can help with location centering in your audience's mind, too. Just be careful not to go too "stock-image" route. That's the visual equivalent of "find and replace."

Thanks. What about going Stock Photo and mirrow the picture, change bit the the colors, add some text or even merge two/three pictures? I guess than it might not be recognized as the same picture. Or of course making your own pictures (if possible).

I like using Flickr or 500px and finding great stuff, then reaching out to the photographer and asking/paying for permission. Many photographers are happy to have their work featured in exchange for a link back (and that helps their businesses, too!).

Ok, nice. In terms of duplicate content: Do you think if I buy a royalty free stock photo and change the picture (mirror, change colors, use just a part of the picture, add some text) then Google wouldn't recognize the picture as duplicate content and you could get a better uniqueness bonus from Google. I think many low budget web designers like me who do a bit of Seo prefer to use stock photos then flicker photos. Stock photos like from istockphoto or depositephotos etc. Or even SEOs might put it on a ToDo list when a web site consists out of stock photos to add some uniqueness value to the site. Only if the changing of the pictures would work of course. That's why I am asking. Or maybe the bother with this is to much comparing to the gain. I don't know.

I just purchased my Pro membership a few days ago and with the recent articles and reading the top comments I can have a better idea about the preferred tools at Moz to build better strategies and campaigns.

Thanks for anyone that also contribute to this article with small but useful comments.

THANK YOU, Rand for calling out the "Find and Replace" strategy and saying it sucks. It's so true. :) It really comes across as pure spam in 2014. And appears to be lazy marketing, really.

It's great when companies go the extra mile to create a local brand within the larger, bigger national brand. This provides unique experiences in each local market, focusing on only what's relevant to potential visitors in that city.

Rand you are just killing it with the mustache. Captain Morgan doesn't have anything on you. As far as the local pages I would second what you said about Uber. I have been doing some studying of their business model and what really impresses me is the fact that the essentially place a community outreach manager in every city in which they operate, even before they actually have cars on the ground. Their community manager usually does a great job of creating a personality, establishing their social accounts and doing email marketing. Although Uber does have very deep pockets I think their techniques can be implemented on a smaller scale. Meaning start with one city, develop some best practices for establishing local footprint and then repeating these steps in the next city. This is where it is sometimes a good idea to outsource so you can have your community manager be local, without your company actually having a physical location.

Great insights, thanks! One thing I learned today: our travel blog features explicitely non-scalable content. We could not hand over our approach to an agency to have them create more content like ours. It's all 100% handmade.

Will need to hint Google to this. Do they rank the poor folks higher that produce non-scalable content?

"Find and replace" is basically duplicate content. This is a big "no no". I'm glad you pointed out that while some companies are getting away with it, it's because of their domain authority. If you're just starting out, it's a spammy approach.

Web users have seen it all by this point, and they're much better than they used to be at spotting templated content that's had no love put into it. I think the main question is whether you can inject that life and spirit into the content by way of the second method you mention here. User Generated Content is a great way of making a templated local page exciting and vibrant, if you get it right. I think you should almost always use the third, "bespoke" method for the geos that really matter to your business model, but it's obviously not always practical to scale that, as Rand says.

I will never understand how anybody enjoys drinking whisky or whiskey :)

I think you nailed it with the whole "Intent". I've see far too many of the find and replace (or find, replace and spin). I've also seen examples where you get a ton of irrelevant (to the searcher) content (Ex. content on a town's history and tourist attractions on a local service page for a company that provides plumbing services). The key really is as you said satisfy searcher intent and delight visitors. Not only are you going to have good content that way, but you are also more likely to get conversions.

Strictly themed targeted page would not only give a better search results but also help search engines to find your page and index them in SERP's. This is what we always follow in AdWords and seems like what Google propounds as best practice in paid is the one for SEO too. The example was interesting indeed and I love David's comment that he loves Whisky & Whiskey both. Thanks for sharing Rand.

It's funny how something simple, expressed in a different way can change the way you look at things. Your video wasn't revolutionary in content to me, but it did completely change the way I think about web design and supporting content. I've created a basic model out of what you said, and applied it to my wireframes for a few upcoming client sites.

I really love your videos and can't thank you enough for the amazing content.

Joshua StrawczynskiJMarketing Pty Ltd

p.s Rand doesn't pay for kudos, this is not a shill..... unless he pays me, in which case, very happy to be a shill ;)

Hey Rand, great video. I am already doing a version of each service location page that is somewhere between your 2 recommended pages, however I am still finding that for 90% of areas either its my Homepage ranking first (not always strongly) or the location page doesn't rank well at all. My q is, what do i do with the homepage? try and keep it non location specific? Our main service area is ranking well but it is the homepage not the location page.

If I wanted to offer my products/services in three different countries, so I created MyServices.com, MyServices.ca and MyServices.co.uk, but set these up to be regionally specific through Google Webmaster tools, would I potentially be hammered for having duplicate content across these three sites? Supposing say, 95% of the content on the sites was the same (a few different terms used, spelling was slightly different, but most of the content was identical), but each site hosted a separate blog. Can each site perform well organically within its own region, or will the duplicate content hurt it?

This is great because it answers a lot of common SEO questions in 2015. For example, ever since Panda I've been brainwashed into thinking that any scalable approach to keyword-targeted landing pages is a no-no. But this is a beautiful example of three levels of page quality and scalability that works well. Also you take into account different budget levels. I like the idea of starting in the middle tier to rank for some local keywords and then when you have the budget upgrading to higher quality pages.

I know I'm late to the party here, but don't you think these type of city landing pages, when you don't technically service the area are a "tactic". As such, how long before Google simply buries your page with other local businesses? I feel like Google is moving towards providing almost all results as they relate to local intent. Do you think that almost all searches performed ultimately boil down to some sort of local service or product being needed?

Great article and advice, there is just one thing, you say find and replace will fail, why do you think this is the case? I have been studying the find and replace method and one of my competitors is seriously successful with this method. I find it a little annoying and don't understand why he would be successful.

Is this a practice that should be penalised by Google or is it just a practice that is frowned upon.

This post and many other posts bring me to the following conclusion: If the user queries/ intents are very diversified (could be duo to local searches) for your product you have to have pretty diversified content (best case), this means you have to spend a lot of time in it. As an online marketer you cant do all this stuff all by yourself, which means your main goal should be to motivate your coworkers to start your regular offline talks about your product online. I work at a university in germany since two weeks, the most of the employees are not realy into the whole "internet thing". I guess my main task should be to point out the relevancy of the online world for every single employee (building up a personal online band etc.) - To make every employee more sensible to the topic. If they make the experience that the online world brings them personal benefits, maybe they are more willingly to start a online conversation about the product there selling (if they like it). :D

We often talk to much about the things we have to do and to less about the people were working with and how were working with them. This is my opinion.

Hey Rand, thanks for this helpful post. I have a client who makes hard apple cider. Ill send you a bottle since we have events all from California to Canada. You solved my question before I even figured out how to ask it.

I appreciate this information! Do you have any suggestions for geo targeted landing pages for Adwords campaigns? It is difficult to have unique content when the services are the same for multiple locations.

Rand - thanks for this and your many other WBFs. Always a sane voice coming from you among the Bedlam. But you need a more, how do I say this, 'manly man' (?) shirt in order to 'represent' for Seattle. Try this one:

Yeah - it's always hard to know why someone succeeded, but I try to point to folks that have done things well and leave it to our community to investigate the various factors that might be creating that success.

Very interesting blog this week. Question for you Rand, how would you go about scaling location pages for classifieds sites where the main goal is to get local listings in front of people searching for that location?

You'd need to have very compelling landing pages, and lots of good quality classifieds. In a way, Yelp and Urbanspoon are sort of doing this with their pages, but you'd need to one-up that quality/value in order to be competitive nowadays (as they have other historical advantages). You'd also want to find a way to scale organic link + social referrals to those landing pages (building a flywheel), which is a huge challenge, but also a great barrier to entry.

Great post Rand, however what if I offer a very specific business service and want to target cities where I don't have a physical presence? To meet the intent of a "<service>+<city>" type search I have no choice but to provide info on competitors in that city that actually have a physical presence. This might be beyond the pale for some!

Rand always amazing and great topic this is most of my business where I work. So many companies want to rank in all the surrounding Geo's that their business can target and in the past my downfall has been the "find and replace method" with customizing the content a bit. You shed so much light on how taking the happy medium of both a unique page but also something that can still be streamlined. I have just sent this to my entire team, so thanks for making me look good this Friday both my boss and clients will be happy.

I used a similar strategy to this about a year ago for my debt relief [link removed] location landing pages in NY, CA, FL, San Diego, Georgia, TX, MD and Arizona. All of these pages are ranking top 6 on Google for competitive location debt relief related phrases. Like Rand said I used a group of keywords all on one landing page rather than spreading them on multiple pages. For example we used debt settlement, debt consolidation and debt relief all on one page, with the location in certain spots which I will talk about below. I guess we did a good job at building the template that we used because if you go onto Google and type in San Diego Debt Relief, or San Diego Debt Consolidation, Georgia Debt Relief, Arizona Debt Relief, Arizona Debt Settlement, Florida Debt Settlement, consolidation, relief,etc... We are ranking on page one of Google for all these competitive phrases and in every single location that we published these location pages. Yeah a lot of it has to do with the fact that our programs really work and in all the states we rank in we have successfully helped thousands of consumers with resolving their student loans and credit card debt, but the other half of our success relies on the proprietary location page SEO template that was used for these pages. And who says SEO doesn't work! Of course you will notice all of our location pages use original content, but the URL, content, markup, headings and keyword density formula all use the same formula. Like I said to find one of our location pages on Google just type in one of the phrases I mentioned above and look for goldenfs.org or simply take a look at our Texas debt relief page here. www.goldenfs.org/debt-relief/Texas/

I think you guys will find this formula helpful considering our site is a midget compared to like Yelp or Angie's list, but we still rank better than all of the big guys that advertise for local debt relief related phrases.

You picked a very good topic and I'm sure lots of companies (especially E-Commerce guys) gonna find it really useful. I have some things in my mind on this topic and it'd be great to have your word.

Lots of companies are buying virtual spaces from the agencies in order to show their identity in new cities. They get the physical addresses,phone number, Po boxes and placed on their sites. Even if they got any kind of mails, these agencies forward all the stuff to head-offices.

I got approached by a client who has various sites targeting to specific locations, like AbcTexas.com, abc-birmingham.com. Even though, they don't have any physical locations there just because of the domain name and site's content they're ranking on decent places. Although, they used this thing for their PPC campaigns but they're getting good traffic from organic as well.

I think buying physical space in the cities is fine if it's relatively real (someone could actually come in to those locations and meet someone or have a brand experience with you). Otherwise it's spam.

Second approach I strongly dislike because you're splitting link equity and it's much harder to build up the authority/flywheel (plus, managing many, many sites is a huge pain).

That was really an amazing thing you have described for the Local/Geo targeted pages. I am working for a Education Portal named as IndiaCollegeSearch.com which have the same problem with the Geo Targeted pages and Search Terms. My question for you is that, will the same strategy will workout for my website as well or you can suggest some thing additional to go on???